Dancer - Perl Web Framework for easy and fun webapp development

What is Dancer?

Dancer is a simple but powerful web application framework for Perl.

Key features

Dead Simple - Intuitive, minimalist and very expressive syntax.
Flexible - PSGI support, plugins and modular design allow for strong scalability.
Few dependencies - Dancer depends on as few CPAN modules as possible making it easy to install.

Prepare your moves... and dance!

Dancer has been designed as a Perl web framework which is easy and intuitive to get to grips with:

    #!/usr/bin/env perl
    use Dancer2;

    get '/' => sub {
        "Hello World!"
    };

    dance;

    $ plackup bin/app.psgi &
    ...
    $ curl https://localhost:5000/
    Hello world!

Getting started with Dancer is easy, yet it provides everything you need to write your web applications with ease!

Easy database interaction

If you're using a Perl web framework, you want the easy stuff taken care of for you, so you can write the interesting stuff. The same applies to database access - it should be simple and non-tedious.

ORM with DBIx::Class

Dancer2::Plugin::DBIC provides easy database access using DBIx::Class:

get '/profile/:id' => sub {
    my $user = schema->resultset('Users')->find(params->{id});
    ....
};

Or easy DBI database access

Dancer2::Plugin::Database manages your database connections, providing an augmented DBI database handle for you to use:

get '/profile/:id' => sub {
    my $user = database->quick_select('Users', { id => $params->{id} });
    ...
};

Either way, we've got you covered.

Automatic serialisation for AJAX/APIs

Just enable one of the built-in seralizers and any references your routes return will automatically be serialised to JSON, XML, YAML - whatever you need. Use the Mutable serializer and the format can even be selected by the user making the request based on an "Accept" HTTP header.

ajax '/getloadavg' => sub {
    return {
        timestamp => time(),
        loadavg   => ( Unix::Uptime->load )[0],
    };
};

The above example simply returns a hashref from the route handler; the serializer takes care of turning it into the desired format (e.g. JSON) and returning it to the user.

(The example comes from the Dynamic AJAX charting with Dancer 2011 Advent Calendar post.)

You can also follow Dancer on GitHub and on Twitter

What people say about Dancer...

In the end I went with Dancer and I'm loving it so far - some more docs on the idiomatic way to deal with user creation, authentication and roles might be nice but I think I figured it all out pretty quickly. - Simon Wistow

Dancer - Perl web framework

The easiest way to write web applications in Perl

What is Dancer?

Key features

Prepare your moves... and dance!

Wide template support

Easy database interaction

Automatic serialisation for AJAX/APIs

Easy session support

Extensible with plugins and engines

What people say about Dancer...